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Vivaldi Webmail

vivaldi.com

27 pointsindigodaddy15 comments

Trying to check it out but they insist on me giving my phone number. I got some spam issues in the past, so right now sorry, but my phone number is a private detail that I share only with physical people that I want to engage with and with whom I have a certain degree of trust.

I wish we had in Europe something similar to what mintemail.com is to email addresses... (Google Voice is US-only AFAIK)

A database with verified phone numbers is worth a lot more than without them.

Service creators, please look at your forms from a lay user's point of view, especially if you're a relatively unknown company/name and are venturing into something you're not known for.

On the signup form, there is a checkbox with this text:

"I'm planning to use Vivaldi.net Mail and/or Blogs (requires phone verification)."

What exactly is Vivaldi.net Mail? How is anyone supposed to know what that is? How is it different from Vivaldi Webmail? What exactly is Vivaldi.net Blogs? Is it referring to reading Vivaldi.net's blog (sounds silly) or creating blogs there (how?) or commenting on blogs there? Can I signup for Vivaldi webmail without checking this box?

Also, does Vivaldi Mail support IMAP so that I can have my own copy of the mails and use other standard apps to access it (without having to solely rely on webmail)?

Lots of questions...and concerns!

Tangentially: Why do today's startups have the same magenta/purple gradients in design? Literally every contemporary website just reeks of the same cookie cutter magenta and purple aesthetics. From Firefox to Apple advertisements - so much purple. Don't modern designers introspect this trend?

I am a founder of software house that was using magenta/purple colors in commercial products even when it was not hip back then in 2007.

The main signals behind those colors: out of the box, above and beyond, useful, pretty much reliable while being somewhat playful and comfortable.

Had a few supercilious looks when I presented the products and corresponding logos to my peers back then, but it all played well in commercial terms. Customers loved the aesthetics.

Regarding goliath companies using the same guerrilla design: they are mostly dishonest. But any mass design is somewhat dishonest, so I cannot blame them here.

It's just RoundCube?

How do you figure? If it’s just from the interface, they could be using a fork.

The screenshots looks like vanilla Roundcube to me, and most (all?) of the features advertised are available in Roundcube itself or an included plugin.

That said, a hosted version of Roundcube is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do wish they'd put their own spin on it and add some unique features.

What's interesting is that it specifically looks like pre 1.4.0 Roundcube with the Larry skin, and not the shinier Elastic skin.

I noticed in their help page (https://help.vivaldi.com/article/vivaldi-net-and-its-webmail...) mentions a 5 GB storage limit and 20 MB attachment limit.

My guess is there'll be a "pro" or similar version to fund the project, similar to what things like ProtonMail have. It would have been nice if they'd been explicit about how they're able to offer it free and without ads.

How does Vivaldi aim to monetise this? Why is it free with no strings attached? Plenty of other questions that need to be answered.

I have no affiliation with Vivaldi, but they don't receive any revenue from webmail and I don't think they plan to.

Vivaldi monetizes the browser. Specifically, they receive money from search engine providers by including them in the browser by default, like DDG, Bing, Ecosia, etc. (except Google; they don't receive any money from Google, but include it anyway due to popularity). They also receive money from the default bookmarks/favorites that are included in a fresh install, like eBay, Amazon, Kayak, etc.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/

Not impress with the website security. Will be staying away from that for a while.

Was about to signup then that annoying complex password requirment came up.

It would be great to see data encryption at rest used in services like this. I like ProtonMail for their innovations in that space.

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